


bid me take life easy

by Alias (anafabula)



Category: Cultist Simulator (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Banned Together Bingo 2020, Cannibalism, F/M, Infanticide, Non-Chronological, Stream of Consciousness, Survivor Guilt, The Crime of the Sky, Trauma, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:00:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24420217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: We had said: we must simply speak, and never touch; we’ve done it before already; that will be better than death, that will be enough.The woman who was once Teresa Galmier, who has walked in the footsteps of the Watchman, the Baldomerian, is now called the wisest of the alukites; though not by Christopher Illopoly. Never by him.
Relationships: Teresa Galmier | The Baldomerian/Christopher Illopoly
Comments: 7
Kudos: 11
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	bid me take life easy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Berguba](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Berguba/gifts).



> If you give a mouse a cookie, and by “a cookie” I mean “the BTB prompt ‘Babykilling’” and by “a mouse” I mean me, well,
> 
> (Berguba proposed this AU to me quite a while back!)

And I turned my back for a moment, a second, only a second. I was so relieved to see them both whole, with the joy of any father who spent months and then hours knowing that at heart he could only watch and wait, and I knew—

I knew—

*

I thought I heard someone, and we had feared discovery above all else for so long, such a difficult fear to even hold; and so I turned my back on her, I turned my back on the love of my life and—

*

In my memory, should I choose it, more often even and especially when I don’t, it is now. It can always be now. I am confiding in her (she had always been resplendent; now she was inhuman with it as well) that my reach exceeds my grasp, that I would never have it in my capacity to bear the rigors of Winter enough to understand what _was_ asked of me to understand, that I have found my limits earlier than either of us had hoped. That I could see her in my sleep every night until my death but when put to the question of following her my answer was no.

Her hand on my arm was more electrifying than warming, and we had talked about this before, long before, when she’d not ascended so far in mind let alone in what would remain of her body, if not with this level of finality at the time. And I expected the sadness in her smile but could not understand why she leaned to whisper in my ear. Not when it was just the two of us. Until I understood, instead, too well.

Winter chilled her breath on the side of my face, chilled my bones down to the fingertips. Electric, electric cold. She told me what I would need to know.

*

My memory isn’t flawless, but it comes close, and the flaws and their absence are both lenses edged with knives: laid over one another, together, their clarity cannot be overestimated.

*

I know so much. I know so much.

*

It’s been long enough that I’ve committed myself to this study – possibly history’s oddest ethnography, and much less publishable than hers – that a woman, the shape of a woman, staring through me with measured indifference, asked if I had sought out the wisest of the alukites yet. Surely that would be more useful, she said; most of them are less than fond of speech, less still of memory.

I smiled and thanked her, of course. Even with my nature, I managed to say nothing more than that; but only just.

*

I always thought of her as fearless, or nearly fearless. If she never, never looked down when passing the Ascent of Knives – as was all the more frequent with power to that extent, the freedom it could grant the both of us – if she never looked at those who seethed below, well, neither did I.

*

As if it mattered. As if it ever would have mattered.

*

Those in our line of work knew violence; violence, and the things we did not want to know. I was not familiar with the sound of a breaking human spine, had not heard it so many times as to be well acquainted; rather the one memory would sit with me forever.

This was different, somehow. A smaller spine; an even smaller sound.

*

And was that act conscious— which is to say, was it her? Not just her hands but her will? I believe so. I believe so, if only (and I know this) for how I want to believe it is so. I believe she opted for the quickest death, when it was all that remained for her to do. I believe.

*

More often than not – I have only fragmented secondhand memories for this, and those in the cases where an interlocutor saw fit to grant me their worst and final secret at all, which is nowhere near a majority of those I’ve asked – it seems people would have let the child bleed out. Rather than admit what they were doing, what they were driven by our nature to do, or else unable. It’s a cruel and difficult thing, to stop and think of such weak mercy.

*

Of course we were young; we had turned our backs on Death itself to walk after something greater, we would neither of us ever condescend to know oblivion. Of course we were hubristic about it.

I loved her so much – every moment, which is now, and I love her, and I wanted – of course I was a fool. I should be honored that she was equally foolish for me. I should have realized; but I never would have thought it of her.

*

Mourning, more than any other form of knowledge, takes time. Mourning does not compromise. I know this; I have known this ever since she told me a secret my soul should not have been able to hold. And it’s taken time to even hear whispers: of an outlier among the empousai, who may be asked for a different kind of small favor.

*

Or maybe not.

*

It was worth it, it wasn’t worth it, the idea of worth lies dead to me now. There is no such thing, only the will that is the Hours and the inevitability of their outcomes. Value aside from that, value itself, even should it be in the hand of the Forge of Days, means nothing, nothing not meant by its absence. Nothing at all.

I laughed, I was breathless with it, and my mouth tasted like blood and like light. Like the knowledge the two would never be different, when I realized, truly realized, that we would never fear a mortal man again.

After so long, and so many near misses. So many. Their evidence in the skin I’d left behind. So many.

*

We had said: we must simply speak, and never touch; we’ve done it before already; that will be better than death, that will be enough.

*

I stumbled at the end, in more ways than the one, close to her and closer still to death and failure, and I cried out, in more ways than one; she took my hand—

*

Of course we were hubristic, had always been. The level of not just determination but blithe dismissal of human understanding and human law to reach the House at all, let alone further, let alone the way Teresa set her heart on the Stag Door and what lay beyond it as cleanly and intractably as if she’d somehow asked the Mother of Ants to take it from her chest, is almost incomprehensible.

Was it hubris if you succeed? Was it rightful ambition? When does it stop being ambition and start being a mistake? Nothing about either of us had changed.

Nothing about us changed.

*

People still know her name, if nowhere near as much as she deserves. The elision of the name I called her, the name she was called in context of mystery and insight and the everpresent need to avoid the rule of mortal law, and the name she might have been buried under in case of failure, is complete. There is no difference between the two. Teresa Galmier, called the Baldomerian, known for unparalleled insight, walking the earth beyond her death.

She did want that, not just in the quietly determined fashion of someone who’d learned the hard way to publish before people took the words out her hands; but not like this.

*

I know where to find her and have never brought myself to look.

*

Not yet—

*

If anyone can do something with this narrative it would be her. If anyone will do something with this narrative it must be her. Mourning takes time, but I believe in her. I always have. I do.

*

I do.

*

The body was so small. Of course— of course it was; it’s strange that what stays with me is the obvious. But even unbroken, it would have been such a little thing.

*

It was almost unthinkable, for both of us, to hide anything. I don’t know how we managed it at all; the time that passed is hazy and uncertain, and secrets were not something given to us to ever keep again, but somehow no one knew us for lovers, no one saw what she was going to do. Somehow, in the way most unlike our nature, no one looked, even when it was obvious.

So we’d touched hands. Then that would be enough, we resolved, I resolved, her hand in mine, something I’d have considered unimaginable once. More than enough.

*

More than enough, the way one kiss was more than enough. The way what followed, mercilessly inevitable, was more – much more – than enough.

*

What does one call the partner of a succoyant?

*

There is not a term for it in any History I can know, as it happens. Of course there isn’t. Why would anyone bother? Whatever I am, my story ended there.

*

I turned as quickly as I could, when it was happening, when it had already happened, when it was already forever. I knew before I did; I knew, and so there was no moment of shock or incomprehension for what lay before me to see, even if I would otherwise still be able to experience either. The picture was clear at the time and is clear now, overlaid on every other way I could imagine her. Not that it’s truer than any other moment, it has no disproportionate weight. It is enough to be equally true.

*

It’s not about desire. I cannot wish it was about desire – there are a great deal of things I cannot, in fact, think of wishing – but it would be easier. Like a dying soul, like the laws of the Hours it reflects, like gravity; it’s not about desire. It’s not about anything.

The body was so small, and so still, and I would have thought of it as red if there weren’t for the contrast: on her bared teeth, streaked down her chin. Even a small body could hold so much blood.

There should have been something to mark that cataclysm, there should have been an equal rend in the order of the universe, someone other than us should be forced to know. There wasn’t. There isn’t. It’s not unnatural; it’s the most natural thing in the world. There was nothing remarkable about it outside the fact that it had happened, when it was always going to happen.

Raw, torn flesh in her mouth; raw, torn flesh in her hands; the way it made the viscera all monochrome, as if drawn in carelessly, as if that had been all but dismissed by a painter more focused on capturing the wide-eyed misery in her gaze as she met my eyes over the body of our newborn child. It would be difficult to do intentionally; for all the ruthless precision of my memory, I know I’d be unable.

The way the wild horror and the resignation and the bloodlust don’t even deign to coexist, the idea they could be synonymous: there’s nothing quite like it. I don’t think I could convey it to another soul.

*

I do, however, avoid being given the opportunity to try.

**Author's Note:**

> I think one or both of them end up recovering enough to follow the Vagabond in a more active sense eventually, if she’d take them; I... would like to think she might.


End file.
